Torsten Bøgh Köster

Career Summary

As a software engineer I have expert level knowledge in constructing, developing and
running high traffic web applications. I embrace open source software and am passionate
about agile software development with Scrum. I am metric driven, have a passion for
log management and love to talk about my findings at conferences and meetups.

Work Experience

Engineering Lead (CTO)

shopping24 internet group

2012 - Present

As CTO I am accountable for developing and operating the shopping24 product
search platform. Together with the engineering team I maintain the api and search backend
based on Apache Solr, the product backend systems (Java) and the portal
frontends (PHP). I code on a regular basis in both operations and search
and assist the teams in system- and software architecture challenges.

Key projects:

Insourcing of server operations: Development of a centralized configuration management using Ansible. Setup of a hybrid cloud hosting using bare metal, VMWare and KVM hypervisors as well as Amazon AWS. Recently pushing the transition into containerization using Docker, Kubernetes and Ceph as distributed storage.

Design and implementation of a inner source e-commerce search solution for the Otto Group based on Apache Solr. Onboarding and consulting of several Otto Group companies like otto.de and Limango.

As a in-house consultant I joined the implementation of the e-commerce search at otto.de and Limango. Implemented technical and relevance search monitoring, extended the CI/CD pipeline to do blue/green deployments.

Building and eventually spun off a SaaS to manage Google and Bing ads at large scale. Wrote an entity extraction as a Apache Solr plugin in order to categorize ad terms. The software is used by multiple tenants inside the Otto Group.

Technologies used:

Apache Solr

Ranklib

Kubernetes

Spring Boot

Java 11

Docker

Kubernetes

Logstash

Filebeat

Graylog

Nginx

HAProxy

Traefik

Varnish

Prometheus

Grafana

Graphite

Elasticsearch

Ansible

KVM

Ceph

Team lead Java development

shopping24 internet group

2010 - 2012

As a team lead responsible for restructuring and refactoring
the Java API and product management backend.

Key projects:

Recruitment and training of the Java development team. Insourcing of Java development and application support for the existing Java applications.

Review of the existing system and software architecture. Refactoring towards an elastic and service oriented architecture. Moved traffic and storage intensive data to Amazon AWS.

Introduced Scrum as development process. Established a modern Java development infrastructure for Continuous Integration und Continuous Delivery.

Conceptual design and implementation of a modular REST api for delivering affiliate product data based on Apache Solr.

Centralizing logging, server, application and business metrics for real time analysis.

Technologies used:

Apache Maven

Amazon EC2

Amazon S3

Amazon CloudFront

MongoDb

Apache Solr

Apache Hadoop

Apache Mahout

Zookeeper

Jenkins

Sonar

Artifactory

Github

Redmine

New Relic

Graylog2

Logstash

StatsD

Graphite

Grafana

Collectd

Software Architect Java

Deutscher Ring

2005 - 2010

Developer, architect and in-house consultant for Java based
projects focusing on integrating legacy systems into modern
web UIs. Technical lead for internet and intranet web applications.
Maintainer of the Java development and continuous integration
infrastructure.

Key projects:

Technical team lead for web applications serving customers and insurance brokers.

Switched the complete Java codebase from building with Ant to Maven, maintained build server for continuous integration and Maven infrastructure components

Created an Eclipse RCP based distribution platform for remote offline viewing of data warehouse data cubes

Technologies used:

Java

Eclipse RCP

Spring

Hibernate

Spring Security

Central Authentication Service (CAS)

IBM DB2

IBM Content Manager

IBM MQSeries

Websphere Application Server

Tomcat

Lucene

Hudson

Sonar

Artifactory

Software engineer & server administrator

Freelancer

2002 - 2005

Acquired and implemented Java and PHP development jobs. Gained
knowledge of Linux server administration in high traffic environments
as systems administrator for the largest soccer community in Germany.

Technologies used:

PHP

MySQL

Wordpress

Lighttpd

Debian Linux

Software developer PHP & Perl

Have-IT

2000 - 2002

Developed custom tailored applications for german high traffic
websites in PHP and Perl.